


sleeping like we're lovers

by cassiesandsmarked



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fix-It, everyone lives happily ever after
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-28
Updated: 2014-07-28
Packaged: 2018-02-10 18:09:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2034930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassiesandsmarked/pseuds/cassiesandsmarked
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Clarke,” he says, voice rough, and it could almost be mistaken for a warning, like maybe he thinks that she’s crossing a line, except that she knows him too well for that, knows that this is him giving her an out—saying that if she wants to walk away right now and never talk about this again, she can.</p><p>Instead, she twists her hand into his messy curls and kisses him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sleeping like we're lovers

**Author's Note:**

> so i don't really know what this is?? but i had a dream about body painting and i was ~inspired and this was supposed to be like maaaaybe 2k and then it just kind grew into this lil monster so. (and, because this is me, i had to throw in some clarke/raven and a lil blake siblings bonding, too haha)
> 
> enjoy & feel free to leave a comment below!!

The quarantine ward reminds Clarke of her cell on the Ark. It isn’t that the two are aesthetically similar—her cell was all gray metal and ratty bed sheets and, here, everything is white and spotless and so bright that it hurts her eyes sometimes. But they’re both cold and detached and they make Clarke feel empty—there’s nothing familiar, nothing personal, nothing to remind her of the things that she cares about.

Time passes slowly in isolation—it’s not long before Clarke loses track of how long she’s been there.

(It feels like a month. It’s only nine days.)

It’s on the tenth that the alarm goes off and an armed, masked man barges into her room, stands in front of her door with his hands clasped, staring straight ahead.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer. She isn’t surprised.

“Is something wrong?” she tries again, standing up, stepping forward.

He says nothing.

Clarke’s jaw tenses. She inches closer, glares up at him. “What does the alarm mean?”

He glances down at her this time, only for a second, before training his gaze over the top of her head.

That’s when the window explodes and the guard drops. In the moment that it takes Clarke to register that he’s been shot, her door swings open and she sees Raven standing there, gun grasped in one hand, dressed in the same white clothes that Clarke is wearing.

Raven grins. “Miss me?”

The first thing Clarke does is exclaim, “You’re alive!” Then, she surges forward and throws her arms around Raven, who stiffens before returning the hug with one arm, the other still hanging at her side, holding the gun.

“What, you thought a bullet and a little internal bleeding was gonna slow me down?” Raven quips when they let go.

Clarke laughs breathlessly. “So, the alarms—they’re because of you?”

Raven shakes her head and shrugs. “Nah, those started before I got out.” She glances back down the hallway she’s standing in. “And, speaking of getting out, we need to move. Now.”

Clarke nods and reaches down to grab the gun off of her guard’s belt, which she tucks into her waistband. “Let’s go.”

There are sixty eight of them left. Sixty eight. The number plays on repeat in Clarke’s mind after Raven says it. Bellamy and Finn aren’t among them. Octavia isn’t there, either.

Sixty eight.

Raven looks to Clarke, at first, but Clarke can’t quite manage to step up, start barking orders—that was always more Bellamy’s territory than it was hers—so Raven does it for her. She’s good at it, Clarke thinks. Leadership suits her.

They’re almost out when they run into two masked guards and Raven and Clarke are both up in arms immediately, guns aimed.

“Take it easy, princess,” says a familiar voice and then the taller of the guards is pulling off his mask and Clarke feels like the breath has been stolen from her lungs.

Then she’s grinning and people are cheering and there’s a part of her that wants to rush forward and hug him—she probably would have, too, if Jasper hadn’t beaten her to it.

The second guard takes of his mask, too, and it’s Finn and he’s looking at her, not Raven. There was a time that that would have made Clarke’s heart race, but, now, it only drenches her elation in bitterness and makes her clench her jaw in irritation.

Pointedly, she ignores him and looks back to Bellamy.

“I should’ve known,” she tells him with a laugh.

He grins back at her.

-

They make it to the ocean, after all. It takes them three days, but they make it.

Jasper is the first to break through the trees, the first to really see it, and he lets out a whoop of laughter, pumping his fists in the air, when he does.

Ridiculously, Clarke’s first thought is that she wants nothing more than to paint this—white sand and blue, blue water and waves crashing on the shore, the sky colored pink and red and orange with the setting sun. It’s beautiful.

About a third of their group surges forward at once, filling the air with cheering and laughter, and most of them wade into the shallows, while a few others just drop down onto the warm sand.

Clarke watches, fighting the smile that is tugging at her lips. “They need to be careful,” she says to Bellamy, who rolls his eyes at her. “I’m serious! They can’t swim and we don’t know what’s in that water.”

“Just let them have this,” he says, nudging her shoulder with his own. He thinks that Octavia would love this—thinks that if she were there, she would have been the first in the water. The thought makes him smile.

Clarke wants to argue, but she can’t, so she just walks forward and sits down, kicking off her shoes, burying her feet in the sand.

It feels peaceful and it feels safe and Clarke knows it won’t last, but she pushes that thought to the back of her mind and tips her head back, feels the wind in her hair, and breathes. It’s enough, she thinks. For now, it’s enough.

-

It doesn’t take them long to set up camp—they build walls, taller, stronger than the last, and they pitch tents, using supplies stolen from Mount Weather and salvaged from their old camp. They learn to fish—something Jasper is astoundingly good at—and Monty leads groups into the woods to collect herbs and plants and Octavia shows up on their sixth day there, grinning as she launches herself into her brother’s arms.

It starts to feel normal and good and safe and Clarke thinks that she could learn to love this.

-

It’s during the second week after their escape that she sees Bellamy’s scars for the first time. She ducks into his tent without announcing herself—which has kind of, unnoticed by either of them, become a _thing_ since her escape. Everyone else thinks it’s hilarious—and starts talking before she even looks over at him.

“Hey, so I was wondering what you wanted to do about the whole—” She stops talking when she realizes he’s half-naked and is about to avert her eyes when she notices the burns. The marred pink skin stretches across one side of his lower abdomen and around to his back, ending a few inches below his shoulder blades.

Before she can say anything, he’s tugging on a shirt and gruffly asking, “Wondering what I wanted to do about the whole _what_ , princess?”

She can tell that he doesn’t want to talk about it, but Clarke isn’t going to let it go that easily. In three short strides, she crosses the tent and tugs the hem of his shirt up to get a closer look. She thinks she hears Bellamy huff in annoyance, but she ignores that. It appears to be mostly healed, but the scarring is pretty deep, so she ghosts her fingers around the edges of it because she doesn’t want to hurt him.

She doesn’t, but he still sucks in a deep breath at the contact.

“This is from the rockets, isn’t it,” she says, and it’s not a question.

He nods anyway.

She jerks her hand away from him then, her entire body staggering back with it, and it goes to her mouth. She exhales a shakily. “This is my fault,” she says and she can hardly even look at him because the heavy weight of guilt is settling in her stomach and seeing his face will only make it worse.

“Hey,” he says and his voice is low, almost comforting. It’s probably the first time she’s heard him talk like this to anyone but Octavia. “This isn’t on you.” He says it firmly, like there’s nothing he believes more than this. “You did what you had to do. I would have done the same thing.”

“Would you, though? If it were Octavia out there—if it was someone you cared about—would you have shut the door?” Clarke asks and Bellamy tries not to read into that too much ( _someone you cared about_ —is she talking about him? Or does she still have feelings for Finn?).

“I don’t know,” he tells her. “If it had been Octavia—” _if it had been you_ , “I don’t know if I could have shut the door. But you’re a better person than I am, Clarke.” And it’s selfish, he knows, but he really isn’t certain that he could have done it—isn’t sure that he would have closed the door if it had been Octavia out there or if it had been Clarke. He thinks that Clarke is one of the strongest people he’s ever known because she did.

She looks up at him then and he offers a small, lopsided smirk, if only because he thinks it might make her smile.

It does.

-

Clarke can’t stop thinking about Bellamy’s scars and she hates it, because every time it crosses her mind, she feels sick to her stomach with guilt. Her usual nightmares—the ones that started during her isolation in Mount Weather, where she’s stuck in place and she can’t yell and she just has to watch as the flames swallow Bellamy and Finn whole—have warped and now it’s just Bellamy and he’s screaming and his skin is angry red and pink and he looks at her and tells her that it’s all her fault. _You did this_ , he says once, accusatorily, before he screams again and she wakes up with tears brimming in her eyes and her hair plastered to her forehead and an _I’m sorry, Bellamy, I’m so sorry_ caught in her throat.

One night she doesn’t sleep at all because, every time she closes her eyes, she sees flames dancing behind her eyelids.

They’re in the middle of a perimeter check when she broaches the subject. “Does it still hurt?” she asks. At his arched eyebrow, she elaborates. “Your burn. Does it still hurt?”

His entire disposition changes—where he’d been relaxed and teasing before, he becomes rigid and closed off. His jaw tenses and Clarke thinks she sees his hand move to hover over the burn before dropping back to his side.

“No,” he says after a moment. “Not so much anymore.” It hurt like hell for the first week, though, he almost says, but he doesn’t, because he knows her, knows that she carries the weight of the world on her shoulders, knows it would only make her feel worse.

“I wish you’d told me about it sooner,” she tells him, keeping her voice light, so he knows she isn’t trying to be accusatory. “I could’ve gotten you something for it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says and he means it. He looks at her and he hopes it tells her what he wants it to. _This isn’t your fault. You don’t have to take care of everyone all the time._

She almost laughs. “Don’t worry about it?” she exclaims and she knows she was too loud, too harsh because she sees him flinch and start to withdraw, like he always does when she pries too much. She tries to level her voice. “Bellamy, you could have _died_.” _You could have died and it would have been my fault_. “I thought that you were dead,” she says and she hates how small she sounds.

“I’m not,” he says unnecessarily, deliberately brushing his hand against her wrist to remind her that he’s alive—that he’s right there, standing beside her.

Clarke wants to grab his hand. She doesn’t. Instead, she leans her shoulder against his, just for a few seconds, because the warmth of him is comforting and because he feels solid, strong, _alive_.

Her dreams aren’t plagued by demons that night and it is the best sleep she has gotten in a long time.

-

He moves into her tent a week later, after a storm destroys almost half of their camp and they become seriously cramped for space. _It makes sense_ , she had told him with a shrug before her lips quirked into a smirk. _Besides, this means you won’t have to worry about anyone else finding out that you snore like a pig._ He had flicked a berry at her and burst into laughter when it hit her right between the eyes.

Surprisingly, it isn’t really awkward at all. Sure, the first few days are an adjustment because they’re both used to having their own tent, but, after he walks in on her changing twice and she drowsily puts his shirt on in the morning instead of her own, they start to fall into a pattern without even realizing it.

He memorizes her—learns that she’s left-handed and that she folds her clothes every night before she goes to bed and that she goes to take a bath every other day because it drives her crazy when her skin starts feeling too grimy. He knows how she looks when she’s just woken up and her hair is a mess and she’s groggy and irritable, glaring at him as she ties the laces on her boots.

She memorizes him—learns that, sometimes, he also wakes up in the middle of the night shaking and pale from nightmares and that he doesn’t actually snore as loudly as she likes to tell him he does and that he’s unexpectedly neat and that he’s been keeping track of their days on the ground, making a notch in the leg of their table every morning with a knife. She knows what he looks like when he’s just woken up and his hair is a mess and he’s _irritatingly_ awake already, watching her amusedly as she tries to pull on her shoes.

They go from living in the same space to living _together_ astonishingly fast.

On the third night, Bellamy skips dinner to oversee some reconstruction and Clarke brings him a tray of food when she gets back to the tent. Bellamy looks up at her with tired eyes when she sets it down in front of him and smiles faintly when she says, “Thought you might be hungry.”

“Thanks,” he replies. She shrugs and returns his smile.

The next day, Bellamy asks a girl, who he’s seen mashing up flowers and berries and anything else she can find to make paints, if she could make him some. “It’s a gift,” he tells her. The girl smirks when she gives them to him and says, “Clarke’s gonna love them.” Bellamy ignores her pointed stare—pretends that he doesn’t know what it means.

Clarke does love them. She beams up at him and it makes her look younger, brighter, like she’s been given a temporary reprieve from the burden that has settled over both of them during their time on the ground. He’s glad that, if only temporarily, he can shift the weight of the sky off of her shoulders and onto his own.

It’s a moment that passes too quickly, but, later that night, Bellamy catches Clarke looking at the paints where they sit on the table, the corners of her lips upturned into a small smile, and he feels a warm glow of pride that he’s the one responsible for that smile.

Eventually, it escalates from silly little kindnesses to washing one another’s clothes and tidying the other’s side of the tent. Neither of them really even notices—or, if they do, they don’t say anything.

It’s been a week and a half when she gets halfway to the river and realizes she’s forgotten her jacket, which she’s been meaning to wash for days. She ducks back into their tent without announcing herself and she’s caught off-guard at the sight of Bellamy’s scar.

It’s something she hasn’t thought about in a while—they’ve been so busy trying to rebuild after the storm that it just slipped her mind—but, as soon as she’s reminded, a familiar feeling of guilt settles over her.

“I forgot my jacket,” she tells him when he looks over, startled at her appearance. She doesn’t move to grab the jacket off of her bed, though, because she can’t tear her eyes away from his naked torso. Faintly, she thinks that it might not just be the scar that’s catching her attention—that maybe it might have something to do with the fact that Bellamy is handsome, which she has, on some level, always been aware of, but hasn’t ever really thought about until now, and shirtless.

She isn’t entirely sure which one of them moves—probably her, but it might have been him—but, suddenly, he’s right in front of her and she can see the smattering of freckles on his tan skin, trailing down his neck and over his shoulders. She can see the pink scar tissue, stretching up and around his back.

He watches her hand stretch out, feels her fingers barely touching his skin, and it reminds him of the first time she saw the scar, except, really, this is nothing like that at all. The first time, Clarke was shocked and concerned and he had watched her snap into doctor-mode as soon as she’d seen the burn.

But, this time is different because it feels intimate and her touch is sending electric currents sparking down his spine and she’s looking up at him with blue eyes from under her lashes, her breath tickling his chest and, _fuck_ , he wants to kiss her.

“Clarke,” he says, voice rough, and it could almost be mistaken for a warning, like maybe he thinks that she’s crossing a line, except that she knows him too well for that, knows that this is him giving her an out—saying that if she wants to walk away right now and never talk about this again, she can.

Instead, she twists her hand into his messy curls and kisses him.

He melts into her touch, moves one hand to her waist, pulling her closer, and the other to her face, cupping her cheek. She still has one hand on his bare waist, absently tracing the edges of the scar as she arches up into the kiss, and he feels acutely aware of the contact as her fingers dance across his skin.

They kiss until she feels dizzy and light-headed and she has to pull away to breathe. As soon as she has, though, she pulls him back down to her, both hands on the back of his neck, and he hardly has any time to miss the feeling of her fingertips on his back because she’s nudging one of her legs around his and it doesn’t take him long to catch on. He wraps his hands around her thighs, hitches her up so that she can hook her legs around his waist.

Clarke’s breath catches when his lips move to her neck, kissing, sucking, biting at the soft pale skin, and she tips her head back, digs her fingertips into his skin, trying to pull him closer still.

A laugh rumbles in Bellamy’s chest and he pulls back to look at her, drinking in her flushed cheeks and mussed hair and her half-lidded eyes. He can already see a hickey blooming on her neck and one of her sleeves is pulled down over her shoulder. He runs his fingers along the hem of her shirt, barely skimming over her bare skin, and pauses for her nod of assent before he walks them over to the table and sets her down on top of it so that he can tug the shirt over her head.

Normally, Clarke thinks she would feel too vulnerable like this, wearing just her pants and bra with her legs wrapped around some guy’s waist, with her hair falling into her face and warmth pooling in the pit of her belly. Except that Bellamy isn’t _some guy_ —actually, he’s the person she trusts most in the world and that’s probably why the flush in her cheeks isn’t there because of embarrassment or discomfort, but because the way he’s looking at her is just making her want him even more.

She kisses him again and it’s still full of passion and heat, but it’s slower, now, less frantic, like they’ve both realized that it’s real and it’s happening and that loosening their grips won’t cause the other to slip through their fingers.

Of course, that doesn’t stop him from holding her body as close to his as he can, from wanting to feel every inch of her skin pressed against his own, wanting to feel the beat of her heart.

She toes her boots off, her legs still wrapped around him, without breaking the kiss and she feels Bellamy huff a laugh against her lips, his fingers carding through her hair.

And then his fingers catch on a tangle—because her hair is a goddamn _mess_ —and she hisses in pain, pulling back.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says, his voice husky, trying to work his fingers through the knot, his face twisted in concentration.

Their eyes meet and, a second later, they both burst into laughter, her head falling forward to rest against his shoulder as they giggle like they don’t have a care in the world.

Finally, he untangles his fingers from her hair and, grinning, tilts her chin up for another kiss. His hands go to her hips, thumbs stroking her soft skin, and it doesn’t take long before their breathing is labored and they can feel the rise and fall of the other’s chest against their own.

He reaches behind her and deftly unhooks her bra, waiting for her to slide it off and toss it onto her cot before his mouth is on her collarbone, tongue darting out to taste her skin. And then his lips are trailing lower to the valley between her breasts, kissing and sucking at the pale skin, and she’s running her hands over his shoulders, arching into his touch.

His fingers find her fly and he flicks the button open, pausing until she rolls her hips encouragingly and then pulling her pants down, over her ass and down her legs. He tosses them onto the floor behind him haphazardly and, out of habit, she almost snaps at him to pick them up, but his hand is slipping under the band of her underwear and all she can think is _holy shit_.

It doesn’t take Bellamy very long to realize that watching Clarke fall apart beneath him is one of his absolute favorite things. She has one hand on the table beside her, bracing herself, and the other is curled around his bicep, her nails digging in every time he does something that she really likes. Her head is tipped back, chest heaving, and he can’t help but think that she looks best like this—uninhibited and breathless.

She finishes fast, comes undone at his fingertips with a buck of her hips and a moan, her eyes squeezed shut. He’s grinning when she opens them again.

She pulls him down into a kiss to wipe the smirk off of his face and, with fumbling fingers, tugs his pants off, rolling her hips forward. It does what it was meant to do, because the smirk falls off of his face and he throws his head back, moans.

She huffs out a laugh against his neck and then presses her lips to his pulse point, her teeth just barely grazing his skin. Her legs tighten around his waist, pushing their hips flush together, and, at this point, Bellamy can’t even fucking _think_ anymore, just presses his face into the crook of Clarke’s neck and breathes her in. He picks her up, both hands gripping her ass, and lays her down on his cot, taking a minute to appreciate her messy hair, lust-blown pupils, reddened lips.

She arches an eyebrow and, with a teasing smile, asks, “Are you just gonna stare at me all day or—”

He cuts her off with a kiss that leaves them both panting. “Clarke,” he says gruffly, “shut up.”

Clarke’s grin only widens and she arches up against him, their chests brushing.

His breath catches. He hooks his thumbs into her underwear and she lifts her hips so that he can pull them off. She reciprocates, yanking his boxer briefs down as far as she can, letting him kick them the rest of the way off.

She grinds her hips against his, letting out a breathless laugh when he reaches down with one hand to grab her ass, pull her closer. She runs her fingertips over his skin, over the ridges of his scar and following the curve of his hipbone, and tips her head back in a moan when he presses into her.

Her nails are biting into Bellamy’s skin and he’s certain that they will leave little half-moon imprints that will last for hours. He doesn’t mind, though, just sets to work on sucking a hickey into the skin just above her collarbone as he snaps his hips forward.

She laughs against his lips when he moves from her neck to her mouth and he pulls back, looking affronted, but the feeling dissipates at her smile and he dips back down to capture her bottom lip between his own, swiping his tongue across it and rolling it gently between his teeth.

She sighs into his skin when she comes and he isn’t far behind her, murmuring her name against her cheek as he finishes and then flops onto the cot beside her, grinning.

They’re both quiet for what could only be a few seconds, but could also be minutes, because lying with her head on his chest and his face pressed into her hair is making time pass both too slowly and too quickly all at once—Clarke wants to freeze this moment and live in it forever, to memorize the smell of him and the way his thumb is tracing patterns onto her skin and this blissed out feeling that she doesn’t think she’s ever felt before.

“So,” Bellamy says, his voice muffled by her hair, “that happened.”

Clarke huffs a laugh. “Yeah. It did.” She cranes her neck to look him in the face, eyes searching. “You’re not going to freak out, right?”

He arches his eyebrows. “Me? No. You? I’m not so sure about,” he says, a laugh rumbling in his chest when she smacks him lightly.

“Shut up,” she says, laughter in her voice. Then, more seriously, she tells him, “I’m not going to freak out.”

He looks at her for a minute and there’s something in his eyes that she doesn’t recognize and he nods. “Good,” he finally says and he presses a feather light kiss to her hair that fills her with warmth—not hot and persistent like before, but comforting and soft. Clarke thinks that she likes the feeling.

-

It’s later that night, once they’ve hauled themselves out of Bellamy’s bed and gotten back to work, that Clarke runs into Raven, who takes one look at her and crows, “Holy shit, you got laid!”

Clarke’s mouth gapes open and she claps a hand over Raven’s mouth, hissing, “Raven, oh my _God_.”

Raven shakes her hand off and full-on beams at Clarke before dragging her back behind one of the tents, away from anyone who might overhear. She just looks at Clarke expectantly and Clarke sighs.

“How did you _know_?” she asks finally and Raven lets out a triumphant _ha!_ before she reaches over and pinches a sensitive spot on Clarke’s neck.

“Hickeys,” she explains, smirking.

Clarke’s hand slaps over her neck with an exclaimed, “Damn it!” She makes a mental note to give Bellamy shit about it later.

“Who the hell was it?” Raven looks downright gleeful, although that flickers when she pauses and asks, “It wasn’t Finn, was it?”

Clarke balks at that and shakes her head furiously. “No! No. Absolutely not.” She puts a hand on Raven’s shoulder and repeats, voice firm, “No.”

Her grin comes back full-force and she waggles her eyebrows. “Come _on_ , Clarke. Spill,” she demands.

Clarke responds with a noncommittal mumble that sounds vaguely like Bellamy’s name and Raven’s jaw _drops_.

And then she starts laughing, the traitor—keeled over, can’t breathe, knee-slapping laughter—and Clarke just glares, although she’s fighting her own smile because she hasn’t ever really had a friend like this, hasn’t ever really had someone to talk to the way she can talk to Raven. She’s only ever had Wells and it was always different with him—not _bad_ different, really, because he truly was the best friend she’s ever had, but _different_. With Raven, though, Clarke can talk about anything and Raven just rolls with it and grins and makes some witty comment that leaves Clarke cracking up.

Clarke likes that about her.

Eventually, Raven’s laughter dies down and she straightens up, wiping at her eyes, before saying, “I just won, like, a _week’s_ rations from Jasper.”

Clarke gapes at that, although, honestly, it isn’t _that_ surprising when she thinks about it because, yeah, okay, she and Bellamy are sharing a tent and she knows that Monty and Jasper have been calling them Mom and Dad behind their backs and, well, she’d be lying if she hadn’t thought about it before. But— _bets_? Really?

“Don’t tell anyone,” Clarke pleads. “Not yet. We haven’t really—we haven’t talked about it yet.”

Raven sighs and, with a playful grin, says, “Your secret’s safe with me.” Then her eyes dart down to Clarke’s neck and she lapses back into laughter.

-

Clarke is worried it’s going to be awkward when she gets back to their tent that night, but she quickly realizes that her concern was unwarranted when she ducks under the flap of fabric and Bellamy greets her with a kiss.

Clarke leans into it, winding her arms around his neck, and, when they part, arches an eyebrow inquisitively.

Bellamy just grins at her and brushes his fingertips over the marks on her neck, making Clarke shiver. “Looks good on you, princess,” is all he says and she rolls her eyes, but she can’t stop the smile that crosses her face.

“Yeah, whatever,” is all she says, still smiling, before she slips out of the warmth of his arms and sits down on her cot to pull her boots off. “Octavia says we’re running low on herbs in the med tent, so I was thinking we could send a few people out with the hunting party tomorrow to collect some more.”

Bellamy nods. “Sounds good.”

“Also, Jasper says the guys on the west wall are slacking on construction and I figured we could move Miller over there, ‘cause they actually listen to him. Oh, and we should think about sending out a few scouts to see if there are any more of those bunkers around here because Raven’s been working on making more radios and—”

“Hey,” Bellamy interrupts when he sees the little crease between her eyebrows forming and the tension returning to her shoulders. He sits down beside her, runs a hand up and down her back. “Relax. We’ll deal with it in the morning.” She opens her mouth and he stops her with a kiss. “You don’t have to be the responsible one all the time.”

Clarke drops her head onto his shoulder and mumbles, “Yes, I do,” into his shirt.

“Clarke,” he says, amused.

She huffs and, after a beat, nods. “Okay.”

They sit like that for a few moments, quiet and still, and then Clarke says, “Neither do you, by the way.” At his puzzled look, she elaborates. “You don’t have to be the responsible one all the time, either, Bellamy.”

It reminds Bellamy of their conversation on Unity Day. _So do you, by the way_ , she had told him, and then she had smiled, laughed when he replied. _Alright_ , she said, her voice light, and then she walked away and he remembers how her hair had looked like liquid gold in the light of the torches.

This time, he doesn’t brush it off, doesn’t ignore the sentiment. “Yeah. Yeah, I know,” he says.

That night, they fall asleep in Clarke’s bed, fully-clothed, with their legs tangled together and their hands linked.

-

It’s a week later, when they’re lying in bed—singular, not plural, because they’ve started pushing their cots together at night—and he’s absently rubbing little circles into the skin just below the band of her bra with his calloused thumb, that she says, “Do you think we should tell people?”

She can’t quite read the look on his face when he says, “Do you?”

“Maybe. I mean, Raven already knows and I’m pretty sure Octavia’s going to figure it out soon enough, with or without our help, because she’s weirdly intuitive about this kind of stuff, and I know Monroe hasn’t _said_ anything about the incident in the woods, but are we really sure she didn’t see anything?” The words come out rushed and he can tell that she’s a little breathless by the time she’s done talking.

She feels Bellamy’s chest rumble with laughter. “If you want to tell people, we can tell people,” he says.

She looks at him for a moment and then she nods, a tiny smile pulling at her lips. “Yeah. I do.”

“Okay,” he agrees and he presses his lips to her hair.

They lapse into a comfortable silence, only filled by their breath and the beating of their hearts, until Bellamy spots the paints he’d given her on the table and asks, “You gotten around to using those yet?”

Clarke looks a little bit guilty when she shakes her head. “Not yet—it’s just everything’s been so busy and—” She stops midsentence and, slowly, her lips curve into a smile. She props her chin up on his chest. “Can I paint you?” She pauses. “I mean—can I paint _on_ you?”

He thinks he can see a flush in her cheeks and it is _ridiculously_ endearing that they’ve been getting naked together on the regular for over a week, yet she’s embarrassed about something like this. “Depends,” he says. “You aren’t gonna paint a giant dick on my back, are you?”

She snorts and slaps his shoulder. “No promises.” She grins and untangles herself from his arms so that she can pad across the tent and retrieve the paints. When she crawls back into bed, she jerks her head at him and says, “Roll onto your stomach.”

“Bossy,” he teases before he does.

Clarke rolls her eyes and throws a leg over him, straddling his lower back. “Try not to move,” she says, smiling, as she uncovers the paints.

“No promises,” he says and she can hear his grin in his voice as he shifts beneath her.

She pulls her hair back before dipping her finger into the paint—which is unnecessary, really, considering that she found a set of paintbrushes in a bunker a couple of weeks prior and has been keeping them rolled up in a sheet of plastic under her bed since—and smearing his skin with blue.

Bellamy squirms when the cool paint touches him and when her finger drags across his back, the skin prickling in its wake, setting his nerves alight with sparking electricity. He doesn’t think that he will ever grow tired of her touch. He hopes that they never stop feeling like this—like a lightning storm beneath his skin, crackling and igniting and chaotic in the best possible way.

Clarke thinks back to the first time she saw the ocean, remembers how feeling awestruck, remembers the vivid colors in the sky and in the sea, and she paints it—the blue becomes crashing waves, crested with white, with the pink and yellow and gold of the sunset reflecting off of the surface. She paints a mural onto Bellamy’s skin, with swirling bright colors and a glowing sun and figures splashing in the water.

He puts his shirt on after, once he thinks the paint has dried, and it leaves behind stains that take him half an hour to wash out. He thinks it’s worth it, though, because Clarke grins when she finally finishes and there’s paint smeared on her cheek and she looks happier than Bellamy has seen her in a long time.

-

They decide to tell people about them—not that either of them really knows what _they_ are, because dating feels like too loose, too immature a term for this, whatever the hell it is—a few days later. Well, really, Clarke just tells Raven that she can collect her winnings from Jasper and, by noon, the entire camp knows, because Jasper can’t keep his mouth shut.

Clarke can deal with just about everyone’s reactions—smugness from Jasper and Monty, bitterness from Finn, warm congratulations from Lincoln—but she doesn’t really know what to do when Octavia stomps into their tent, lips pursed and jaw tense, and says, “Really?”

“Octavia—” Clarke begins.

“I had to hear about it from _Jasper_ ,” Octavia snaps and the flash of hurt and anger in her eyes hits Bellamy like a punch to the gut. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We didn’t tell anyone, O,” he says, stepping forward, reaching a hand out to touch her shoulder.

She jerks away. “Yeah, well, I didn’t think that I was just _anyone_ , Bell. I thought we were supposed to trust each other,” she says and, this time, Bellamy is the one who recoils, stepping back like he’s been slapped.

“That’s not fair—” he starts to say, but Octavia has turned on her heel and stormed out before he can finish.

They’re both still for a few seconds after she’s gone. And then Bellamy lets out a ragged breath and, tentatively, Clarke places her hand between his shoulder blades, rubbing gentle circles with her thumb. “It’ll be fine,” she says when he looks down at her. “She’ll be fine.”

Bellamy finds Octavia later that day, a few hours after the sun begins its descent. She’s sitting on the beach, her bare feet shoved under the sand while she watches the waves roll in, and, when he sits down beside her, she doesn’t look over at him.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You have every right to be mad. I should’ve told you.”

“Damn right, you should’ve,” she grumbles, casting a glance at him out of the corner of her eye. They sit there in silence for a few beats before she asks, “Is it serious? You and Clarke?”

He contemplates it for a second, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “Yeah. I mean, I think so.”

Octavia nods. “Good. Clarke doesn’t deserve any of that shit you usually pull.”

“I know.”

Then, they’re quiet again and Bellamy closes his eyes, listens to the water and the wind rustling the leaves on the trees and the sound of Octavia breathing.

She bumps her shoulder against his and, when he opens his eyes, she’s looking at him and there’s something serious in her eyes. “You deserve to be happy, Bell,” she tells him. “So does Clarke. Don’t ruin this for yourself. And don’t let her ruin it either.” Then she smiles and it’s small, but it’s there. “Or I’ll have to kick both of your asses.”

Bellamy grins.

-

(Neither of them ruins it.)

**Author's Note:**

> you can follow me on tumblr @ [ravenclarked](http://www.ravenclarked.tumblr.com)


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